Keeping Critical Scholarship Alive in Stark Times

It is with much pleasure that the Department of Educational Leadership at California State University, East Bay, the editorial team, and editorial board members release the inaugural issue of The SoJo Journal: Educational Foundations and Social Justice Education. We hope SoJo comes to hold special resonance for critical scholar-practitioners who are committed to consuming and producing scholarship for the purpose of uncovering what gives rise to injustice, oppression, and social inequalities inside and outside of educational institutions. We also hope the journal will offer pedagogical practices, empirical insights, and alternative structures that have the capability of building a new social order on the ideals of freedom, radical love, and justice (Counts, 1932; Freire, 1970; Kincheloe, 2008). We believe this academic venue is special due to the fact that critical scholarship predicated on ending human suffering is being rooted out of academic conversations, out of classroom dialogs, and out of larger education policy debates by those dominant blocks who have control over knowledge production in the academy, in academic publishing houses, and in mass media outlets (Herman Kincheloe, 2008). Corporate and political leaders are keeping critical scholarship suffocated by providing financial support to scholars who are in lockstep with their worldviews or who embrace their politically driven policies, by compelling academic administrators to hire faculty and support scholarly activities linked to maintaining larger power structures, and by denouncing scholars who produce knowledge that holds the potency to threaten the privileged position the elite hold in various social contexts. Consequently, the ideas, voices, and insights that have the ability to call into question what is responsible for the increase in human suffering, environmental degradation, and militarism across the planet over the past decade have been stifled in the academy and blocked from impacting salient discussions and decisions impacting schools, educators, and society, whereas scholarship that is deemed methodologically “sound” and “objective” and supports existing political and economic arrangements has become a powerful lever for shaping discussions inside classrooms, at academic conferences, in corporate boardrooms, and on sets of newscasts (Aronowitz, 2015).We are inspired by Joe Kincheloe’s vision for critical academic venues. Joe laid the foundation for how critical academic venues should function when he established the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy before his untimely death in 2008. Like Kincheloe (2008), we aim to be intentionally inclusive of young scholars, rather than perpetuate an entrenched status community of academic superstars. Although we will only produce peer-reviewed research dedicated to eliminating oppression and inequality, we will not “brag about our acceptance rate or (be) obsessed primarily with our standing in the scholarly community” (para. 2). We will also not be concerned about offending “the guardians of academic publications with our choice of essays and topics.” Rather, we will center on publishing ideas linked to challenging entrenched policies, practices, and ideologies that are responsible for the need to have this critical journal in the first place. Finally, we will “publish a wide variety of view points” (Kincheloe, 2008) dedicated to ameliorating human misery and fostering an inclusive culture of solidarity, where there is the possibility for forging a shared vision for equity capable of building equalitarian schools and a just wider society (Derman-Sparks, 2002).With the pressing urgency for critical scholarship to be produced and consumed by those inside and outside of the academy, and with the mission embraced by The SoJo Journal: Educational Foundations and Social Justice Education now laid out for you, we hope you and your colleagues will become key contributors to this journal over the coming years. In a small way, we believe SoJo will provide the support and intellectual engagement necessary for establishing symmetrical social relationships across the planet during the second decade of the 21st century.